Thanks for bringing this up. How do you distinguish it from the general adaptation from endurance training?
I also gained (momentarily) 5lbs….while being in a slight calorie deficit. Crazy stuff
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@oldandfast thanks for posting this topic, it’s an important consideration that quite clearly not enough people consider. Have thought about it often myself.
[Entirely sidestepping some thread derailing comments above…] It should be dead clear to anyone that ya, you can clearly over-cool yourself, to the point you can smash out power you’d never manage IRL. Which probably isn’t ideal; train for race day conditions. Just makes sense.
On the flippity-flip, sweating excessively to extremes [ 1 - 2 L / h or more ] puts your body under immense stress, much more deeply than the immediate stress of cooling. H2) & Na balance gets completely out of whack, as does K, badly [Potass., not Vit. K], and other electrolytes in smaller qtys.
Those little dudes are involved in pretty much all transmembrane processes in the body, and having them out of whack puts pretty much everything out of whack, so they need to be replenished, emergency style.
Doing this once a month or so gives you tons of time in homeostasis to fully recover & rebalance all ‘departments’.
Smashing one of these out every single day, or even every other day, would keep me in a constant state of out-of-whack, my kidneys and rest of body fighting valiantly to save my stupid @$$.
The kidney stress particularly should be a real cause for caution, unless I’m mistaken.
End point: It’s really a great idea to not artificially over cool yourself, so that you never get used to working hard in the heat. We don’t talk about this enough; it’s dead clear some riders are smashing targets only because they’re doing so in an F1 team wind tunnel they’ve built at home!!! 
But you want to make sure you’re not over stressing your body. Maybe moderate, or maybe use fans all week, and do 1 - 2 days per week […or month???] sans-fans, so your bod has lots of time to recover & rebalance?
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Actually it doesn’t. If it did, then why would a Pro train low and live high?
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I’m not so sure on this one, I have a blower pointed at my front, a box fan at my back and I’ve trained next to an open window when it is -20C (stopped doing that as my fingers froze). I was still considerably warmer and sweatier than I am outside in temps under 25-27C + sun.
I can’t imagine running no fans on anything higher than low-mid endurance though, and even that has me scared (though I will attempt!).
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I can only say what I personally do, as I’m not aware of a more formal way to do it.
If I’m getting noticeable orthostatic symptoms I go out of my way to reflect on what I’ve been doing in my training recently. If there’s any suggestion on reflection of increased heat stress, I just take a tspn of table salt, mix it up in a cup of water, and take it like a shot. It’s disgusting but I am too lazy to anything else lol. The dose is about 2-2.5g of sodium from that.
I think eating 2-3 average sized pickles would give you roughly the same amount though, and would maybe be more palatable.
If sodium deficiency was the problem, then I usually feel completely better in an hour or two.
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- Got anything to back this up?
There are few and far between examples I have seen shared with people claiming better power inside vs outside. And from memory, none of those were from extreme cooling related setups. The greater majority are from people falling short inside, so I really don’t buy your supposition overall.
It may be possible to “super-chill” a rider (core temp mostly?) to a point where it’s impractical or unlikely for that use case to match outside, but not impossible either depending on the event.
Regardless, I just don’t see an excess of over-cooled riders from what gets shared around here. It’s usually the opposite.
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Related, there are multiple examples of lower HR inside relative to same power outside. This is not only heat, but the stress of riding outside (traffic, terrain)
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Yeah, those seem like good factors to consider. Add in rigid or minimal motion setups for lower muscular demand unless the rider is on something like rollers or a very active motion setup.
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Performing in heat is the largest benefit of heat adaptation but many of the performance gains will also translate to performance in colder weather.
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Do any of you find you get noticeably dizzy when doing workouts without a fan? Doing Zwift races or harder workouts without a fan feels terrible to me.
I’m a North Carolinian and have been doing Z2 rides at around 50f in my garage with the fan off because if I turn it on I’m instantly freezing. It’s the lasko blower and even on the lowest setting it’s a lot.
On harder workouts I start with an extra layer of clothes, some light gloves, and a warm hat so I can have the fan on for the ~10 minutes that it takes me to fully get warmed up and start really sweating.
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Sounds like heat stroke
Warning Signs and Symptoms of Heat-Related Illness | Natural Disasters and Severe Weather | CDC
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It seems weird to me to be getting heat stroke when it’s less than 60f in the garage but it certainly feels like it, which is why I stopped doing it.
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It’s core body temperature. Doesn’t matter how you get there.
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I’ve been doing some of my endurance/recovery rides with no fans recently. I figured 1 it would at least adapt me mentally and physically for when it comes closer to my july race and I might want to do some heat adaptation. But really it is just nice to not have that much noise on some easier rides.
I posted in the KM protocol thread this photo of my gym during the test and it had a significant rise in room temp and humidity:
That was a 10x10 finished basement gym area, opened to a 10x20ish unfinished area, lot of space for that temp rise just from me.
As for the orthostatic hypotension I’ve dealt with this since HS (swimmer), Back then they attributed it allergies which sorting did help a little but never fixed. I Get it even when not training but definitely worse when training. 12ish years ago i was lifting a lot and was getting dizzy doing anything floor to overhead, not the time for that to happen so i went to DR. They were actually able to see my BP dropped out at times when i stood up from a squat. Different former doctor (distance trail runner) suggested it could be linked sodium and had me taking more but it never actually seemed to help. It was also actually always worse on weekends when I usually had a soft pretzel or 2 with my breakfast post ride, so getting plenty of salt in there. I started this year with not salting them and also not adding any salt to my bottles, my workouts were not terribly difficult and I didn’t seem to be getting dizzy later in the day. I started adding some salt to the pretzels but still not bottles and sure enough, dizzy on weekends after rides. But checking my Garmin stats I can also see that my RHR was also starting to fall again around the time i noticed I was getting dizzy. Little tangent there but point more consult your Dr on that dizziness stuff.
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Just a reminder that large language models like ChatGPT are simply that: language models. The information they put out is not necessarily correct. They pull information from all over the internet so they might be pulling information from outdated studies, poorly designed studies, or some bro science blog post. Or they could be pulling good information from good, double blinded, peer reviewed studies. We have absolutely no way of knowing because of the black box nature of these models. The models are simply trained to output language that sounds like an answer to what you’re asking. They aren’t necessarily trained to make sure that answer is at all correct.
I don’t think there’s anything incorrect with this answer as far as I can tell, but just wanted to put it out there as a PSA of sorts.
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Escape Collective recently did an episode about heat training on their Performance Process Podcast about heat training.
You might need to be a member to read/listen to it but that whole series has been pretty awesome so far. I highly recommend signing up if only for that. (But the rest of their articles and content have been pretty top notch too). For anyone that isn’t aware, this is the old Cycling Tips crew that created a member funded cycling news network after being acquired and subsequently cut by Outside.
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It is probably too far out to start heat adapation for a race at the end of April…most of what I have seen indicates that 2-3 weeks is sufficient. @mwglow15 linked to the recent Escape Collective pod, which has a lot of great info in it.
You can also check out the article below, if interested…
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Heat adaptations are sort of a “use it or lose it” - by that I mean my heat related vo2 performance gains disappear around November when the weather turns. I can feel it and see it in my numbers. I’ve toyed with the idea of using a sauna in the winter months, but its too much bother and I’m not buying a sauna as we are moving in a couple years.
Then it gets hot again in May, and I enjoy them all summer and into fall. Its a dry heat here, so a lot easier to ride outside in 90-100F afternoons than in say Humid Houston or Florida.
All outside except for a handful of inside rides.
This was covered in great depth in the early days of the AACC podcast. For easy stuff I never use a fan. Up to Sweet Spot I’ll leave it off unless I’m still building back some conditioning (or turn it on if HR starts to creep).
Hey @mcneese.chad ! Nice to ‘see’ you again!
LOL! 
Don’t need anything to ‘back it up’, buddy!
You don’t, either! Nobody does.
It’s as true as the sky is blue. You’re gonna crank more W with fans than wo. More / better fans = more Ws. A lot more.
Do any WO that’s a H or VH for you, 60 - 120 mins and repeat w the fans off, you’re either not going to finish, or you’ll mark it a full rank higher.
[Extremely important adder note that of c., cooling depends massively on RH. Your cooling drops to near zero as you approach 80 - 95% RH. Pretty sure it drops exponentially rather than linearly, but could be wrong. It’s super fast, and extreme, though.]
As for inside vs. outside, that’s a variables salad I don’t want to touch with a three meter pole!!
But, for kicks:
I’d happily bet ya that >80% of TR riders have very inadequate fan setups. Inadequate = nowhere near the cooling they experience outside. Hence the outside numbers being higher.
But who knows. Too many variables to know it all; like you mentioned; motion of the trainer setup, RH, temp, wind speed, relative windspeed given direction of travel, etc, etc, etc. Too many.
Inside, in a controlled environment w all other variables being the constant, more fan = more cooling = more power.
And if someone [like yours truly!! ] has a best-in-the-world fan, 1 m / 3.28 ft from his face, and he cools that room down to 15 C = 59 F @ a crisp & fresh 30 - 35% RH, and then cranks that fan to a full-body covering, down under the chest AND up over the head & back airstream running at 100 km/h = 62 m/h, he is going to crank insane Ws, and there is no way in heck he could ever go that speed = achieve that kind of cooling, and so be able to generate those same Ws, IRL.
Amirite?!?!